Heimweh
by ohcEEcho
Summary: He had shot a boy of Edmund’s age just yesterday.' On the frontline, Peter Pevensie wonders.


**A/N: ****Ah, here I am in Narnia again. Forgive me Aslan, for I had lost my way. Hee. This was the product of me FINALLY seeing Prince Caspian, and also of my A2 Level English literature studies of poetry of the Second World War. It's sort of dark for me, too.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. Not really Disney's either, technically, but they have more lawyers so I suppose they win.**

**Summary: On the frontline, Peter Pevensie wonders.**

Heimweh

_Heimweh._

It was a word uttered often out here, drifting languidly across the barren planes which separated man from man, nation from nation, life from death. A word used far too casually nowadays, thrown about with haphazard ease.

Heimweh: a longing for home.

Peter Pevensie shifted his grip on the barrel of his rifle, and pondered the word in the ominous quiet. It was a rather soft-spoken word, for German. Having spent hours upon hours straining his ears, he had grown used to the harsh, foreign roughness of the language, but then, he supposed, English must sound irritatingly femenine by comparison. He wished he could understand what they were saying. He wondered if, like the boys over here, they exchanged stories of home; bemoaned the rats and the poor rations and the mud and the rain.

They were not so different, he and these foreign creatures that emptied bullets into his friends and comrades. After all, had he not in turn taken their fellow soldiers, elders…fathers, sons, uncles…brothers. Peter shuddered, and tried desperately to remember what his own brother's face had looked like.

He had shot a boy of Edmund's age just yesterday. _Mein Brüder. Es tut mir leid. _

He shook his head sharply, and winced as he felt the chafe of rough material against his filthy skin, the straps of his helmet digging painfully into the half-healed welts about his neck. The welts drew a clean line across his throat: a guideline, he supposed, for less intelligent German's: cut here. He smiled slightly manically, and wondered whether he truly had gone insane.

His breath rattled in his thinning chest, his lungs heavy with moisture. His thoughts turned once again to that strange foreign word, Heimweh. Literally, so he had been told by Private Bechman (died yesterday; shrapnel wounds to the head) it meant 'home-wish'. He snorted, considering the English equivalent: home-sickness. How ironic. Sick. Was he sick for home? Yes, obviously. Not for Finchley: not that grubby, grey land of monochrome buildings and monochrome people. He longed for somewhere entirely lost to him now.

Home-sick. Head-sick, more like, sick in the head. That was what they called soldiers sent back now. Shell-shock they called it. Huh. Was he insane? Was he sick too? He guessed he must be. But not as sick as Private Bechman, poor bastard. Or lucky bastard, depending on how sane or insane you felt. Peter sighed, licked his dry lips. Battle had never been glorious. It was hard and gritty and depraved. But at least, in that far-off, unreachable haven he had once called home, battle was meaningful. There was courage. Chivalry. Comradeship. A place where your skill and your sword and your wits were all you had as a defence. Well, and maybe an over-protective sibling or two.

And he didn't even have _that _anymore. Not that he would have ever wished a place like this upon Edmund; no. Far better that _he_ was here, and Susan was safe far behind the front line, nursing soldiers like him back to sanity, and Ed and Lu…well. Who knew? At least they were safe. He would know if they were not.

Ironically, it had been _Heimweh_ that had landed him here in the first place. His longing to grasp some semblance of a place to which there could be no return. No going back now. It was lost, to him. Forever. For eternity. And in trying to recapture it, perhaps he had lost himself, too.

_But __**why**__? Why, Aslan? Have I not pleased you? Have I not protected and fought for this land?_

_You have, Peter._

_Then…I don't understand. Is it…does…Narnia no longer need me?_

_No, my son. __It is not that Narnia no longer needs you. It is that you no longer needs Narnia._

No. Aslan was wrong. Peter needed Narnia. Ached for it. Narnia had brought out all that was best in him; all that he had strived to become. Just. Chivalrous. Brave. Powerful. _Loved. _He had loved Narnia: loved its people, loved the very land itself, and Narnia had loved him. But he knew there was sense in hoping. There was to be no return: he would never again ride across the rich rolling plains beyond Cair Paravel. Would never again look up to the clear Northern Sky, over which he had once been proclaimed sovereign.

"Who am I, Aslan?" he had so often asked of the empty air "If I am no longer High King Peter, what is left?"

He could not even vaguely recall how life had been before that fateful day when Lucy had found the old wardrobe in the Professor's house. His head was pounding, his mind struggling to reach a compromise between the collision of worlds: Narnia, and this…nameless realm in which he had been born.

He felt no love for this land.

It was choked and twisted. The animals mute and dumb, the trees silent and still, bowing only to the whims of the occasional wind. Everything was a dull monochrome of black and brown and grey, and the people with it, crawling painfully day after day after day through the monotony and the filth and the fear.

Where was chivalry? Where was justice? This world was just a cavernous pit whose inhabitants writhed and drowned in the swill of sin and bloodshed and death and hatred. There was no place for magnificence here.

A shot in the dark, and the soft blossom of pain in his chest. Peter Pevensie smiled bitterly as blood stained his maroon uniform an accusing Narnia red.

**A/N:**_** Heimweh**_**= a longing for home-or literally, 'home-wish'. **_**Mein Brüder. Es tut mir leid **_**= My Brother, I am sorry- or literally 'my brother, it gives me pain'****. All German should be correct as I am studying it, but if anyone spots errors point them out!**

**This could potentially be the beginning of a chaptered fic detailing the experiences of the Pevensie children during the war, going with the premise that Peter has signed up for military service in search of his Father and his own sense of purpose. However I'm not sure how popular the concept is and I don't want to commit to something I won't finish, so please let me know if you wish this to continue. It works well enough by itself, so. **

**Thanks for reading and please leave a thought at the door!**


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